The Guardian Online recently ran a story Risk Free Rebellion (11 November 2004) which I thought was quite interesting. The story described how 'Live CDs' provide a risk free mechanism for testing distributions (distros) of the open source Linux operating system without having to install it on your system and run the risk of giving the ubiquitous Microsoft Windows a seizure. But there's more. So what's so good about this? Sure, you get to try out another operating system, which is ok for the technically curious, but what's in it for the 'normal' person:) ?
Well first think subject domain. Then think applications/packages specific to a subject domain. Then think operating system and subject specific packages all on one CD. Put CD in appropriate PC slot and voila! operating system and key packages for the discipline are ready to go.
It turns out there's a lot of 'Live CD' specialist distrbutions already out there as a visit to Frozentech may soon demonstrate (the link was down at the time of writing).
No sacrifice is too great for the Auricle readership so I downloaded a couple of these distributions from Frozentech. One was customized Linux distribution which in essence was a toolkit of media editing and viewing tools plus the usual suspects of wordprocessing, email etc. All of these tools plus the operating system nearly filled a CD and so took a couple of hours to download on my domestic broadband system. Nevertheless, it appeared to work well.
The second download was even more interesting because it was a single purpose solution, i.e. it contained a minimal operating system (a micro distro:) and a multi format media player. The whole Geexbox distribution was only around 50MB. I didn't hold out much hope for this but I slotted in the CD I created from the download and restarted my PC and a couple of minutes later I was watching a DVD. Now I begin to see how the equivalent of Microsoft's XBox gets created. You take a small box, try not to make it look like a PC and load a minimal operating system and mini applications and there you have your new product.
Other micro distributions include group collaboration tools.
But you can't write to a CD, so what if your distribution contains wordprocessors etc?
Many of the distributions are aware of hard and removeable drives on a host system and so it become possible for user specific data to be stored to say a thumb/flash drive so that the user can carry their data away with them.
Caveats? There's a few. Many of the more modern distributions do a good job of automatically detecting specific hardware on a users PC, e.g. video and audio cards but you can't guarantee this and if something isn't detected it's contact your local unix/linux guru time. The casual Live CD user will probably walk at this point. Nevertheless, a motivated member of faculty with a large class to teach may still opt for the guru route. Also, it's important that the user of 'Live CDs' realize that the CD contains the operating system as well as the applications and that this type of CD doesn't run from within Windows … it's an alternative to Windows. Finally, if you want something a 'bit special' on a 'Live CD' it's back to that guru again … and don't forget to test it before you run off too many copies. Nevertheless, once your Live CD is created and tested on your target environments you'll not need to worry about your library of applications being missing the next time you visit the shared computer lab.
Despite the caveats there's something neat about plugging in the tool or toolkit appropriate to a particular job in hand and I can't help feeling there's some potential to be explored here.
